Wartime on Salt Spring

So we trekked out to Salt Spring Island for our monument analysis project on a bright sunny morning that matched our neon coloured recording forms and turned out to predict the joy we felt upon getting indoors and consuming hot drinks after three hours of freezing our fingers off recording monuments at the St. Paul's Catholic Church cemetery.

We had arranged to meet at the ferry terminal but ended up all taking the same bus out there (for some reason we hadn't considered this likelihood before). I feel like this have been more comical than it was, but we were all too tired to appreciate it.

We originally journeyed out to the cemetery with the knowledge that it was largely populated by Hawaiian families who played a major role in the construction of the church as there had been a large population in the early history of settlement. We found many monuments bearing shell necklaces, the markers of Hawaiian graves. We were basing our sample on this defining characteristic and found thirteen monuments that fit our requirements. But as were recording we began to wonder if the shell necklaces were a reliable indicator of Hawaiian burials or if they were simply distributed around the cemetery willy-nilly. Many of the graves were accompanied by photographs of the dead. These images were laminated for protection but had been significantly damaged by weather and age. Luckily several of the images can be found in a paper about Hawaiian history in British Columbia.

Upon checking our list of Kanaka surnames we found that all with necklaces did match those on our list but many others in the cemetery that had no shells were also on our list. I feel like this is yet another reminder that funerals and monuments are about the living rather than the dead. The living are the ones who maintain the monuments, re-distributing shell necklaces to the graves of their loved ones. The Kanaka graves without shells are likely to simply have no one regularly visiting them or relatives who no longer see significance in the shell necklaces. 

    While recording we also noticed a common form of monument. The sarcophagi made of cement with impressed lettering were common throughout the cemetery. Upon closer consideration we realized that they all bore dates relating to war-times or the depression. These less expensive alternatives to the pre-war standing stones/obelisks and the post-war carved flat stones maintain a feeling of permanence and importance while remaining practical in such a tumultuous period.

View St. Paul's Catholic Church Cemetery, Salt Spring Island in a larger map


Sources:
Barman, J 1995, 'New land, new lives: Hawaiian settlement in British Columbia', The Hawaiian journal of history, vol. 29, pp. 1-32